Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 26, 1995 TAG: 9501260074
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: You probably have to be under the age of 18, or have read a lot of comic books, to appreciate what a good question this is.
We already have the technology to change the human body. Pacemakers and defibrillators can steady a heartbeat. Bo Jackson has an artificial hip. The deaf can be made to hear, thanks to cochlear implants. An astonishing new generation of micro-machines, with motors thinner than a human hair, has raised the possibility that someday machines will be small enough to travel in blood vessels and help repair damaged tissues.
An artificial hip or a cochlear implant is merely designed to replace or repair existing human body parts. But will machines ever be used to enhance already healthy bodies? How far can technology go?
Edward Cornish, president of the World Future Society, says that someday it might be possible to use computer chips to implant memory or knowledge in your brain. If you had to go to a meeting of geologists, you could buy a geology chip, insert it somehow, and suddenly have the geology vocabulary at the tip of your tongue.
``That hasn't happened, but it's the sort of thing we anticipate happening in the future,'' Cornish says.
Gosh. That's pretty snazzy! We must say it's hard to see how a computer could interface with a brain - there's no slot for a floppy disk in your head and even if there were, you might get confused at the geology conference and accidentally start uploading your unfinished screenplay or your grocery list or whatnot.
But the Cornish example does point in the right direction: Cybernetic technology probably will enhance human intelligence and communication, rather than, say, make people stronger. The flaw with the Six Million Dollar Man concept is that you can make people stronger and faster through genetic engineering and hormone treatments much more easily than through implantation of machinery. Moreover, there's not a huge need in the world for stronger, faster people. The real money is in making people smarter, helping them communicate.
Gregory Stock, a biophysicist and author of ``Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism,'' suggests that the cochlear implant idea might be extended, using fairly simple cellular phone technology, to allow people to receive telephone calls in their ears. That's right: A whole new meaning to having a ringing in your ear.
``It takes your breath away to think what's going to happen to us in 100 years,'' he says.
Another idea: A voice-recognition computer chip, implanted in a tooth, allows you to instantly communicate with someone merely by saying his or her name.
``You could speak someone's name and access that person across the country,'' Stock says.
(The bad news: You sneeze and suddenly you're on the phone with the Achoo family.)
Q: Why do you sometimes see the same TV commercial in the space of only a couple of minutes?
A: The average TV ad isn't even any good the first time. So when, moments later, you see it again, you are not merely repulsed but deeply aggrieved as if a small chunk of your life has been stolen from you, rendered useless and redundant. (This is also how the Why staff feels after most national elections.)
Here's the deal: There are two kinds of TV commercial breaks. Some are network breaks, meaning the ad will appear everywhere in the country. But some breaks are for local stations. They'll show a ``spot'' ad. If you see the same Cadillac commercial twice in a few minutes, it's probably because one was network and the other spot.
The problem can become particularly acute in a live event like a football game. Let's say there's a network break. You see some dorky guys stranded on a desert island thirsting for a Bud Light. Then the game resumes, and immediately a player gets injured and the announcers have to cut to another commercial, this one a local break. The dorks return.
No one planned it that way. In fact probably no one realized it was going to happen until it happened. The networks have a reel of ads: That can't be changed. And in the myriad local TV stations, they have their own reels. No one knows what anyone else is doing.
The companies that advertise hate that. ``You're talking to the same audience twice, and you're paying a lot of money for it,'' says Tom DeCabia, an executive with the Paul Schulman Co., an ad placement firm.
He says that in his company there are separate departments handling national ads and local ads for a single client. Usually the two departments communicate with one another, to avoid overlap. But with a big advertiser like Anheuser-Busch, which is throwing Budweiser ads all over the place, there's no way to police everything.
The flip side of the ad business is that there are great ads that disappear and are never seen again. Why? Why can't some of the legendary ads - like the ``I can't believe I ate the whole thing'' Alka-Seltzer ad - run once in a while?
DeCabia says it's partly because slogans and advertising strategies change, not to mention products (you can't run an ad for a 1970 Volvo anymore), but it's also because the contracts expire for the actors and other talent. Otherwise you'd see a lot of ads showing now-famous actors who made commercials when they were desperate nobodies still waiting on tables.
by CNB